Unofficial news and tips about Google

March 29, 2006

The New Yahoo Mail Will Have Obtrusive Ads

The new Yahoo Mail, currently in beta, will be available to all users very soon. An evidence for that is the fact that Yahoo Mail started to display obtrusive ads: along with an animated flash in the right sidebar, you can now see huge ads (like the one for Vonage) that fill an entire page. Ironically, this ad is included in the Spam section.

Another usability problems regarding ads in Yahoo Mail Beta. There are two group of ads in most of the pages, one in the right sidebar (animated flash), next to the scrollbars that lets you select a mail or read it. The other group of ads sits at the bottom, right under the navigation, and includes the usual "credit card", "free loan consult" small ads. The problem is that it's very easy to click on the ads by mistake. And if you click on an ad, it doesn't open a new page or tab, the page just replaces the ad in the iframe, so you'll get this funny picture.

Because Yahoo chose to stick with the flash ads, if you move from a page to another (from inbox to the RSS reader, for example), you'll notice a big delay in page loading, especially if you have a slow connection.

And another thing: Yahoo didn't drop the welcome page that announces you how many emails you have, and whose only purpose is to make people click on the ad if they don't have any new messages.

47 comments:

To get Yahoo Mail Beta, just switch your content preference to Germany, Frence or UK. Then you will be asked if you want to join the beta when you log into your Yahoo Mail. Say yes, and join the beta. Then from the options menu, change your content preference what it was before. Then go to Yahoo Mail again. You should still see Yahoo Beta. If you don’t see it, go to options and click “Try Beta” button. That’s all.

Firefox + AdblockPlus [this is not Adblock} + Flashblock, and it works fine and you see no ads, on any webpage. It can't remove the two or three text ads on the left but those aren't noticeable really.

Flashblock especially makes sites like myspace tolerable. Nothing loads unless you want it to, or whitelist the site

I'm a longtime gmail user, recently filled up my gmail space quota. There is one thing yahoo has over gmail: sort by message size. This helps you find your largest attachments for reclaiming mailbox space.

Since the ads are in Flash you can Right mouse click and zoom in until the ad is basically white space. Of course this will on work until you refresh the screen and then you may have to do it over again. But it can be helpful when composing so you don't have these annoying blinking ads. Also, I know there is a registry hack for removing the Yahoo Messenger ads. Does anyone know of one for this?!

Yahoo is crap. I am a long time user of both Yahoo mail and ATT/SBC Yahoo home internet. I had ad free Yahoo mail up until about two weeks ago. I still pay for ATT/SBC Yahoo DSL service, but apparently that is no longer enough to keep ads out of my yahoo mail. Literally, Yahoo mail was the last service I was using at Yahoo. Now I think I will be 100% Google. Thanks Yahoo, you suckwad of a web service provider.

Hello Google Bloggers. I noticed a lot of you seem to be unhappy with the advertisements on Yahoo MB e-mail. I just want to let you know, if you are interested, you can search "unlimited storage, it's coming" to find a comment site for that other company. Of the approximately 200 comments, aobut three quarters are from it's customers that are extremely unhappy with those ads. I am one of them. A lot of those customers switched to gmail. I may do the same by July 7

I just installed Norton Internet Security 2007 "Ad Blocking", which is included in the "Add-On Pack", and it blocks all the ads in AT&T Yahoo email. I had switched to another provider, but went back and tested AT&T Yahoo after the install.

I have been a long time yahoo mail user. Now with the ads, especially dating ads, are annoying and defeat the enjoyment of the email. I opened another account on gmail. If Yahoo does not remove all the ads, I will permanently move to gmail. Why the heck Yahoo does not take care of its customers?

For security reasons, I'm told by ATT, I can no longer have my two email accounts on one home page. Now signing in and out of each, added to the new extra slow speed feature, managing my email is like having old dial up. Very progressive of ATT!@#?

Old grandmother here: I have used ATT for many years and am so irritated at them for trying to force me to use the "upgrade" which I don't like and by inundating me with big flashing ads right on top of what I am trying to see. Could we start a strike? Surely they need us as customers. I am ready to change.

Middle-aged-mom here. I am totally disgusted with Yahoo and AT&T. When I go to open my e-mail I see nasty, graphic ads for erectile dysfunction pharmaceutical products...Vimax. These ads appear on paper when I print my e-mails. It is very embarrassing to show others printed e-mails that have inappropriate pictures on them. I have tried everything to eliminate these ads. I will not give up. I will try the above suggestions and let you know if anything works. If not, Grandma you and I will start a publicity event, including a strike boycott.By the way, I'm not a prude. I believe in freedom of speech, understand the necessity of advertisments, but this is an invasion of my privacy.

Pat, Middle Aged Mom or anyone else that is still fed up with ATT and want to unite and do something, please post a email address. Was forced the other day to switch to this AT&T/Yahoo Junk. I could go on for pages saying what I dislike which of course includes the ads. I have my landline. dsl and cell and daughter's iphone with AT&T which when originally taken out at Bellsouth. I extremely resent having to take my time to figure out these not improved changes so AT&T can save $. Seriously if anyone wants to send a united letter or whatever please post.

Actually I hate ads in my e-mail experience PERIOD. At least you can pay to get rid of Yahoo's by purchasing a premium account for practically pennies a month. GMAIL by contrast doesn't seem to offer an equivalent deal. It's the only thing stopping me from adopting e-mail as my e-mail/PIM platform. I refuse to commercialize my daily work to ANY degree. And it shouldn't be impossible to do.

This explains a lot!!! Yahoo is NOT responding to my emails about this. The live chat people act like they don't know what's up and try to say it's something I should be able to adjust. And I PAID for this! This is part of what I hate about Yahoo and their steam rolling over customers. I will use outlook for those contacts that can receive it (another corporate BS issue with Microsoft--if you don't have outlook you can't open the emails). I will not renew my paid yahoo account next time around now that I see what they're up to.

Here are five easy (and above all legal ways) to kill most (95% or more)Yahoo mailbox adcrap:

This is so easy even I did it....

1. In IE9 loadup the most excellent 'easyprivacy list' and make sure it's enabled and also check you haven't loaded a personal list in there as well. If you have just disable other lists, from now on you really won't need them.

2. In IE9 disable web tracking. Untick the goddamm box!It's that simple. Sure some site will instist upon it but for those you go and make the change. It you hate ads the way I do - you'll just do it. Once unticked a whole section of adcrap suppliers no longer have your permission to continue following you around the internet.

3. Go to the site 'mvps hosts' - google it. There's only one and it is very safe. Download and extract the latest hosts file. Note: this file must be extracted as administrator in win7. This is the only maintainence you are required to perform and it has to be done once a month as MVPS update this file once a month and there is no auto update facility.

Note: If your hosts file is locked with an antivirus program you must UNLOCK it before you extract the new hosts file and seriously if you have an anti virus program that locks this file. This is something most people should look for when they buy an anti virus program. It's also the one thing most people invariably don't bother to check. So if you do have a locked hosts file Kudos to you, as you really do take your privacy seriously.

MVPS monthly updates are worth their weight in GOLD as this most excellent and FREE resource combats not only most if not all advertisers in the western world and possibly a few elsehwere as well, but it also kills 100's if not 10000's of other forms of malicous code. This is stuff locked inside the 1000's of web pages you view every day and not just the hideous Yahoo web page bugs.

4. In IE9 set cookies to ONE NOTCH off the very top setting. Some pages you visit will now require you to copy and paste into the allowed cookies sites section of IE9 but Hey you only do that the first time and believe me it's really Worth IT!

5. In IE9 turn off Flash. If you want it just turn it on again. All flash based ads will cease the moment you turn this off.

There is a whole load of other stuff to fine tune your IE9 browser to exclude even more of the nasty stuff, but for now this is the basics. Please remember there is only one browser out there which allows you to exclude all this adcrap - MS IE9.

And the result of all tweaking? You will see web pages load noticably faster. Bandwidth will be considerably reduced. Stuff will happen faster inside your browser. Fewer pc resources will be used running adcrap addons - this frees up resources for programs you actually want to run.

Last but by no means least you will reduce to the risk of ad tracking or infection through page based code for advertising purposes to practicaly zero.

I hate these ads!! Time to make a change frome Yahoo! The last several days my spam box has contained hundreds of items EACH DAY! Have any of you tried to locate a truly- free phone number on Yahoo? It's nothing more than a deceptive ad section. Very discouraging! I also feel like I'm living in 1984 with all of my personal tracking.